NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Joshua Carty
Date: 2026 Jul 17, 08:47 -0700
David Pike, you lazy old navigator you... I tried that, TOO!
It makes sense. A practical navigator could use Pub249 as a star finder and star "selector" for evening sights.
Like you I got my first estimate of latitude from Kochab. Its in the original table (the hand-written table that started this) with a bearing of 356 degrees, and since its also close to the pole in decl, that's a meridian altitude to the nearest degree of altitude, which is all we have in this hand-written list anyway. Altitude was given as 42 degrees for Kochab. That's a ZD of 48, but my "shadow" from this star points South so I make that negative: ZD = -48 {Frank Reed says "be the groundhog" and look at your shadow to decide if the zenith dist need to be negative}. The decl of Kochab is +74. THEN the Noon Sun rule: Lat = ZD + Dec = +26. You're suggesting 27 for lat, which is reasonable, too (given whole degrees of altitude for precision).
Next, we know that the navigator was planning for evening star sights so Sun altitude around -6° or maybe a little lower?, and from the original list we know that the UT is 01:52. Aha! Assuming the date was right, That's enough to give us a longitude near 82 W and also LHA Y (aries) of 232 (that's from memory, needs to be checked).
But it doesn't help explain the list! Not entirely... I look in HO249 2025 and on that row I see
Vega
Altair
Nunki
Antares
Spica
Denebola
Alkaid
Some stars are there. Some are not.
I screen-grabbed Frank's "be the groundhog" advice from a recent Zoom workshop. If that's not ok please delete.
Josh
